Individuals that are from areas with harsh weather in the U.S., like Montana, are known to have more individualistic personality characteristics. (Laurent Lebols/flickr)

Jenna Ladd | November 28, 2017

A recently published study in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that humans’ personalities are shaped by the temperatures where they live. Existing research confirms that human personality varies geographically, but it is unclear why exactly that is. The study’s leading author Lei Wang, a social and cultural psychologist at Peking University in Beijing, posits that temperature could play a big role because the conditions outside influence people’s habits.

Regardless of gender, age, sex, or income, people from regions with temperatures that were mild were more agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, extroverted and open to new experiences. These findings were true in both countries. However, people living in harsher weather regions in the U.S. and China had generally different personality types. Those that resided in harsher weather zones such as Heilongjiang, Xinjiang and Shandong had more collectivist personality traits than their fellow Chinese from more temperate climates. In the U.S., people who live in harsher climates like Montana and Minnesota generally have more individualistic personality traits than those that live in more mild climates.

The study’s authors call for more research on the topic but also point out, “as climate change continues across the world, we may also observe [associated] changes in human personality. Of course, questions about the size and extent of these changes await future investigation.”

Transcript: Scientists, in a new study, have found that the Earth’s oceans are rising nearly three times as quickly as they were throughout most of the 20th century.

This is the Iowa Environmental Focus.

This new finding is one of the strongest indications yet that a much-feared trend of not just sea level rise, but its acceleration, is now underway.

Their paper, published in May’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, isn’t the first to find that the rate of rising seas is itself increasing — but it finds a bigger rate of increase than in past studies.

The new paper concludes that before 1990, oceans were rising at about almost a half an inch per decade. From 1993 through 2012, though, it finds they rose by almost one and a quarter inches per decade.

To learn more about the study, visit iowaenvironmentalfocus.org.

From the UI Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, I’m Betsy Stone.

Iowa Climate Statement 2015: Time for Action

Chris Anderson, Assistant Director of the Climate
Science Program at Iowa State University, spoke during the press conference for the 2015 Iowa Climate Statement at the Iowa capitol in Des Moines on Monday May 11, 2015. (Joe Bolkcom/Twitter)